Posts tagged ‘talent’

If there was one trait that characterized this year’s Williston Basin Petroleum Conference, it was unabashed pride.

Mostly the pride stemmed from North Dakota’s achievement in the last decade after moving from a relatively low amount of oil production (79,000 b/d in early 2004) to approaching 1 million b/d currently, making it the second-largest producing state behind Texas.

The afternoon of the last day of conferences is usually quiet. Many attendees have already left, and those left behind to go to sessions are “the people who are really into it,” as I overheard a facilities person say at the Offshore Technology Conference earlier this week. He was warning a colleague not to try to rush out the final session attendees—they were serious about being there, and their conversations may run over the allotted time, but leave them be and let them cover their ground in their own time.

Thursday, the final day of the 45th OTC, was following the usual routine, but there was one incident that disrupted the quiet. During an afternoon panel about offshore megaprojects, a Q&A break in the middle of the session seemed to point to major rifts inside the industry: the new professionals versus the old guard, transparency versus a culture of quiet, ideals versus reality, and where to expect voices of dissent.

The sudden arrival of a battered Toyota and its three occupants at our place last week underscores the problems Japanese construction steel producers face.

I’m back from a quick trip home. It’s in a once pristine corner of rural Fukushima, just outside the 20km exclusion zone around the crippled Daiichi nuclear plant. The back roads were busier this time, and more lights peeked from distant farm houses.

A few years ago, I had lunch with a female friend in the magazine business. Our talk turned to our respective childrens’ futures, essentially the same conversation parents have been having since Adam and Eve bemoaned what might happen to Cain and Abel: what will our kids do with their lives? (Turns out those two siblings really did have bad stuff in their later years.)

This woman, highly successful in her field, noted that she’d be happy to have her son grow up to be a skilled craftsman, like a carpenter. No, I said. Skilled craftsman, yes, but have him become a welder.

The state of Western Australia is almost half the size of Russia but home to only 2.5 million people, almost 2 million of whom live in and around the state capital of Perth.

The pleasant city has grown rapidly on the back of Australia’s resources boom. The region’s fast-growing mining, oil and gas industries have seen sleek new office towers rise above the city’s older Victorian heritage buildings, staffed by neatly attired office workers pacing purposefully to well paid jobs, A$4 ($3.76) ‘flat white’ coffees in hand.

So it was a resource industry-friendly city in which to hold the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s annual conference and trade show, which ran April 6-9 and attracted a record-breaking 3,600 delegates, making it – according to the organizers – the biggest oil industry conference in the southern hemisphere.

For years now, attracting the best and brightest graduates to work in what’s commonly perceived as the dirty, unglamorous steel industry has been challenging. But there are some signs that may be changing.

Next month, several of the most promising talents will converge in Brussels, having been invited — all expenses paid — as regional champions of the World Steel Association’s 8th Steel University Challenge.

If you had any doubts that energy would be an election issue in 2014, forget about them.

The head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, made clear Tuesday that November elections for Congress as well as state and local offices will figure prominently in the industry’s agenda this year.

“The collective decisions of the 2014 voters will shape whether and the extent to which our nation fulfills its potential as an energy superpower,” Gerard declared in unveiling API’s 2014 campaign, dubbed “America’s Energy, America’s Choice.”

Need a job? If you’re a mechanical engineer — or an engineer, period — your prospects of finding one in the oil and gas industry are pretty rosy.

According to drilling consultants RigZone’s first hiring study released earlier this week, nearly half the hiring managers and recruiters at 183 upstream, midstream and downstream companies surveyed said they plan to recruit oil and gas professionals in the second half of this year.

The footprint of the growing US oil and gas industry is very much on display in the Census Bureau’s report on the fastest-growing metropolitan areas and smaller cities.

The Census Bureau is known for its decennial counting of the number of people in the country. But it also does annual updates that use a variety of data rather than the head counting that takes place every 10 years.